AMID all the
tongue-clucking about the Heidi
Fleiss booth at BEA[BookExpo
America 2002 in New York], a far more
controversial exhibitor seems to have
passed through the show
undetected.

David Irving comments:

JUST for the record, we at
Focal Point Publications have had
a stand at the last five
BookExpos. And the popular Focal
Point posters are in such great
demand that we passed out more
than 400 during the 3 days; they
show Hitler with his ministers
and generals and one bears a
highly flattering quotation about
the original Viking Press edition
of the book
Hitler's
War from none other
than Publishers Weekly
("This massive volume is a model
of careful scholarship,
historical objectivity and
readability.")

I guess that slipped through
before "the circular" arrived
from ADL
headquarters.

The FP stand (total cost with
advert: some $10,000) was
sandwiched handsomely between the
Encyclopedia Britannica stand and
a Digital Mapping company. People
came in from all over the
BookExpo, having seen others
carrying the poster:
schoolteachers asked for several
for schoolroom walls, history
buffs, students, and journalists
asked for them, and a man from
"Newsroom One", on TV, asked for
one for his newsroom wall.

As for the latest edition of
Hitler's War not explaining what
is new, if Mr Zeitchik had turned
to the Introduction he would have
found a section at the end,
What's new in the Millennium
Edition. The dustjacket
carries the same information. The
book is available through
amazon.com, and Mr Mark
Levine of Barnes & Noble
sent a flunky over to the FP
stand, uninvited, to collect
copies of both that book and
Goebbels.
Mastermind of the Third
Reich.

David Irving, the well-known
Holocaust denier who recently lost a
libel
suit in the U.K., exhibited on the
show's lower level under the name of the
publisher he runs, Focal Point
Publications. Irving's
company handed out posters
of Hitler flanked by two members of
the Luftwaffe [sic. German army]
and promoted the new edition of his book
Hitler's War. The title has been
out for twenty-five years, and the Focal
Point site does not explain how the
new
version has been "updated and
revised." Neither Amazon, B&N.com nor
Amazon.co.uk offer the book for sale.

In the BEA guide, Focal Point is listed
as producing "primarily WWII histories and
biographies of its leaders including
Churchill, Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Hess
and Rommel, written by famous British
author David Irving."

We're not sure how we missed it, but on
page nine of the directory there sits a
full-page ad for Focal Point. In it, a
picture of Hitler and
Goebbels [sic. Keitel
and Halder] standing in a
bookstore accompanies the line "Look Who's
Back in Your Local Bookstore," leaving
ambiguous the question of whether the
who refers to the Nazis or Irving.
It explains that Hitler's War has been
revised and that Churchill's
War, "the mighty second volume of
Irving's best-selling biography" is also
now available.

Show manager Greg Topalian said
he does not see it as the convention's job
to discriminate on the basis of a book or
a publisher's ideology. "Our position has
always been that freedom of speech should
reign. You can take exception with a lot
of the things on the show floor. It's up
to the booksellers how they want to deal
with it." Amazingly, he says Focal Point
has been an exhibitor since 1997.

Irving has been involved in a number of
lawsuits over the last few years. In the
most high-profile case, he sued academic
and Penguin author Deborah Lipstadt
for libel in the U.K., where the threshold
for proving such a violation is lower. He
lost the case, and now owes Penguin
several million pounds in legal fees.

The booth was located near the DC
Comics exhibition area and was also close
to several children's publishers. Topalian
said that the convention's space draw is
based entirely on seniority and that the
only time show management might intervene
would be for reasons of sensitivity -- for
instance, it might keep a religious
publisher separate from a publisher of
explicit materials. He added that while
the lower level contained a numbers of
children's houses, it was not designated
as a kids-only section.

Despite the potential for controversy,
Topalian said that the presence of
Irving's company at the show barely caused
a ripple. "Actually, we got a lot more
comments about Heidi Fleiss," he
said.